Robin Systems, a Silicon Valley-based enterprise software company, today announced Robin Containerization Platform for Enterprise Applications, the industry’s first Application-Defined Data Center software platform. Robin Containerization Platform is designed to create an application-centric IT era by liberating applications from servers, storage and VM boundaries. This application-driven approach simplifies the application lifecycle, “unlocks” hidden hardware capacity by deploying multiple applications per machine without compromising performance or availability, and boosts application performance through Robin’s Application-to-Spindle Quality of Service GuaranteeTM. Robin unveiled and demonstrated the first release of this product at Strata+Hadoop World in San Jose.

Robin is the first company to bring containerization benefits to mission-critical enterprise applications such as databases and Big Data clusters, enabling high-performance workload consolidation with the agility and flexibility previously available only to micro applications.

Applications to share a server or machine without any loss of performance and predictability. Thanks to Robin's container-aware and application-centric storage technology, each application gets a guaranteed performance service level all the way from application to storage spindle. This enables even the most critical enterprise applications – such as databases and Big Data clusters – to be consolidated without any performance compromise.

Transparent application mobility across machines without any data loss. By decoupling compute from storage, Robin not only protects applications from server failures, it also ensures portability and mobility without moving or copying any data. Robin ensures seamless data access for applications no matter where they run.

Fast and simple application deployment and lifecycle management. Building upon container agility, Robin ensures that even the most complicated distributed applications – such as Hadoop, or NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and Mongo – can be deployed within a matter of minutes. Quick application clones can be created within seconds, and application-level snapshots allow applications to go back and forth in time for test and dev purposes.

“Robin has been put through its paces across a wide spectrum of use cases, from those with a basic handful of nodes to extra-large footprints of tens of petabytes (PB) of shared storage across several applications,” said Premal Buch, chief executive officer of Robin Systems. “Our early adopters have seen phenomenal results, including 10x agility gain, 50 percent reduction in hardware footprint and costs, and significant performance gains. We are excited to bring to market this transformative product that heralds a truly new era in data center evolution.”

Among its first real-world successes, Robin Containerization Platform enabled a leading global retailer to create a multi-tenant Big Data platform and consolidate clusters while reducing the compute and storage hardware footprint by half. This consolidation was achieved without sacrificing the native I/O performance by leveraging the container technology to ensure application isolation on bare-metal servers. A detailed account of this Fortune 100 customer’s experience with the Robin Containerization Platform can be found in this white paper.

“Robin has been a huge help to us,” said Fernandojose Boiton, vice president, Technology at AutoWeb. “The use of Robin’s containerization platform helped eliminate infrastructure inefficiencies and lower our infrastructure costs. Our applications are performing better and we are able to deploy new applications significantly faster than before.”

“There is a considerable degree of interest in containers among developers,” said George Crump, president and founder of Storage Switzerland. “Robin’s solution uses container technology to streamline operations of enterprise data. Robin’s approach is novel in terms of bringing the containerization benefit to performance-sensitive enterprise applications to enable high-performance workload consolidation with the agility and flexibility previously available only to micro applications.”

“When USAA invests in a company, we’re looking for innovations that could help us better serve our members,” said Nathan McKinley, vice president of Corporate Development at USAA. “Robin has demonstrated a new perspective on data infrastructure, and we’re excited to have invested in them."